AIKE-DELLARCO is pleased to announce Lui Chun Kwong’s solo exhibition “Lui Chun Kwong: Recent Works” in Shanghai, opening on January 24 and on view until March 5, 2015.

Throughout the time spent in New York and London during the 80’s and the early 90’s, Lui has gained familiarity with the concurrent languages of western art. However it was in 1994 - after his Master of Arts degree from the Goldsmiths’ College of the University of London - that Lui decided to move back to Hong Kong and started focusing on what for him was most important - an investigation into the foundations of painting.

Once settled back in Hong Kong in the early 90’s, Lui Chun Kwong has carried on an extensive investigation into the practice of abstract painting over a span of twenty years. Since then Lui grounded his research on the concept of art as a life habit run by strict discipline and on the belief of painting as a daily practice ruled by a meticulous repetition of a process.

Lui called “Landscape series” his abstract paintings because they aim to capture the primordial forces of Nature within the boundaries of the canvas – being those opposite energies of cause and effect, fragility and roughness, movement and stillness, order and chaos. Every line that the artist draws compresses the visual world that our eye captures with a single eye-blink by reducing it to the essential.

The recent works from the series “Yi Liu Shan Shui”, on show at AIKE-DELLARCO, continue the artist’s reflection on landscape by further exploring those layers of abstraction that have been familiar to Lui’s works over the past twenty years. This marks for the artist a return to his own foundations, where simplicity is sought in the purity of the form - long vertical brushstrokes delivers the emotional attachment to natural elements such as the texture of rocks or the straightness of trees and bamboos. At the same time, warmer shades and new tones redefine the traditional palette of colours and contrast within the same field with the stylistic roughness of the earlier works, creating a connection between past and present, in a context where the accomplishment of every new work is just the beginning of a new one.

Lui Chun Kwong was born in Guangdong, China in 1956, and settled in Hong Kong since 1962. He studied at the Department of Fine Arts of the National Taiwan Normal University and returned to Hong Kong after graduation. He obtained a Master of Arts degree from the Goldsmiths’ College of the University of London in 1994. Lui founded the Hong Kong Modern Art Society of Watercolour with his fellow artists in 1988, and chaired the Society for the first three years. He also served as Chairman of the Hong Kong Visual Art Society from 1988 to 2002. Lui joined the Department of Fine Arts of the Chinese University of Hong Kong from 1985 to 2010, teaching studio courses on Western media, and also supervised M.F.A. Students. Lui Chun Kwong established his Yiliu Painting Factory in 2001, and jointly held its first open studio event with his students in October, which became a prelude to the Fotanian Open Studios series.

Overhead. Overlooked. When did you last tilt your chin skyward? Do you notice that awning there, sheltering you from the pouring rain or battering sun? What lies above? What lies beyond?

Imperfect and worn, the fabric and plastic awnings of Shanghai’s traditional lilong neighborhoods are offered a Whitman-esque sense of quiet dignity, heroism, and beauty at the hands of French photographer Nathalie Perakis-Valat. Art+ Shanghai Gallery’s first exhibition of 2015, Over and Above, Above and Beyond: Photography by Nathalie Perakis-Valat, celebrates the unassuming beauty of the everyday through close-up images of awnings displayed alongside texts written by local residents and discarded objects from the neighborhoods. Through abstract-like color and texture, Over and Above, Above and Beyond speaks to the layers of a community, at once a visual and sociological study.

With a raw, natural aesthetic, Nathalie Perakis-Valat’s photography emphasizes the variety, strength, and roughness of her subject matter with very little post-production, allowing the awnings to act as synecdoches for the neighborhoods at large. From the historic and established communities of central Xintiandi to the migrant-heavy communities of Hongqiao, Perakis-Valat’s close-up images hint at what is beyond, at the sun that beats down and shines through cracks and frays, the winds and rains that torment and crumple, the nearby construction that throws dust in the air, and the lives lived beneath. There is a sense of riddles and inside jokes, of humility and anxiety, of perseverance and steadfastness. As Shanghai’s lilongs give way to modern developments, what is lost and what is gained?

Perakis-Valat gives meaning and beauty to the Shanghai lilongs. At its heart, Over and Above, Above and Beyond is a thoughtful characterization of the neighborhoods through the cracks and colors of the awnings that watch over them like mute spectators. Turn a careful eye above and wonder what stories those awnings could tell. These are the true treasures of Shanghai’s lilongs, the modern bits of utilitarian material that clash with the old façades, that go unnoticed yet contain within them the life and history of the city. Over and Above, Above and Beyond offers a sense of place, belonging, and value. Amid the frenetic energy and evolving ramshackle of Shanghai, these awnings stand over and above, hinting at what lies above and beyond.

M97 Gallery is pleased to present “LEAVES OF GRASS”, an exhibition of new silver gelatin photographs by Chengdu-based artist Adou. This is Adou’s second solo exhibition at M97. There will be a reception for the artist on Saturday January 24th from 4-6PM.

In this new body of works, Adou invites the viewer to look at the unimpressive natural world just below our feet. Titled after the famous poetry collection by Walt Whitman, Adou’s “Leaves of Grass” is a lyrical exaltation and reordering of the natural world from discarded scraps and chaos. Part painting and part collage, the natural elements are carefully composed by the artist with allusions to Chinese traditional ink painting and calligraphy.

“Leaves of Grass” reflects an evolution in the artist’s oeuvre away from the human subject with respect to his two previous main bodies of work: “Samalada” (2006) and “Adou” (2011), while embracing the realism of the natural world and the myriad transcendental creations seen in the artist’s new assemblages. A newly published monograph of the “Leaves of Grass” series of photographs is also co-published by M97 Gallery and Thircuir.

[Fiction] is the one and only way to transcend worldly life...Since we are in contact with fiction everyday, its quality affects us just as the air we breathe and the food we eat; if the air is polluted or the food contaminated, those who live in this environment will certainly languish, fall sick, meet with tragic death, or fall into moral degeneration.
Liang Qichao, On the Relationship between Fiction and the Governance of the People (1902)

In 2014, for the second time, China’s foremost state-run institution of contemporary art – Power Station of Art – hosts the Shanghai Biennale, in its converted power plant space.
Entitled “Social Factory”, the 10th Biennale asks what characterizes the production of the social, and how “social facts”are constituted. A recurring point of reference is the year 1978, acknowledged as a turning point in the recent history of modernity. 1978 was also the year in which Deng Xiaoping, who was to become China’s Paramount Leader until his death in 1997, initiated his landmark socio-economic Reform and Opening, re-invoking Mao Zedong’s 1938 exhortation to “seek truth from facts”–a practice that sought to separate accounts of objective reality from subjective imagination. “Social Factory” contrasts this principle with the call to use fiction as a means of social reform, made by earlier seminal Chinese modernizers, like the scholar and journalist Liang Qichao, and China’s seminal social critic and writer Lu Xun, who wrote The Story of Ah Q, Diary of a Madman, etc.
In this vein, the Biennale explores an interlocking set of questions: What is the relationship between the social and the fictive in the construction and re-construction of society? How has the production of the social changed throughout 20th century modernity? Has the production of the social entered a new phase with the massive influx of “sociometric”technologies, the extraction of data and digital profiling, and the increasing automatization of social processes in algorithms? And does China's pre-modern history of social systematization through an unparalleled bureaucratic machinery and archiving capabilities echo in the country’s current processes of social fabrication? How can we grasp the simultaneous impact of history and that of technology on subjectification today? And how does the general process of acceleration and diversification of subjectification play out in the case of China and its current era of social reconstruction?
The “social”is produced by developing the human capacity to relate, through care, affection, and education. The process encompasses the creation of symbols, abstract images and conceptual generalizations, which goes hand in hand with the formation of institutions and material culture. It also includes the constitution of a particular economy of signs, their “animated”and ambiguous relations to functions, meanings, and things. Due to this complex genealogy, “social facts”can never be entirely known; they remain partially implicit, situated between the actual and the potential.
In modernity, this ambiguity of the social, and the possibility to plan and engineer society that hinges on it, has been a matter of ongoing contestation. Bureaucratic procedures, surveys, statistics, and concepts of identity, have variously sought to reduce the complexity of the “socialhieroglyph”(James C. Scott), in order to separate the meaningful from the meaningless, or legible “signals”from “noise.”Drawing on both contemporary and historical works, as well as music and cinema, the 10th Shanghai Biennale presents art works that call such separation, and its historical productivity, into question.